Shu Guifeng and Zheng Dongdong: Nielsen’s Reconstruction of Marxian Moralism: A Contextualist Perspective and the Absence of the Dialectical Dimension

In contemporary Western Marxist scholarship, Kai Nielsen is a "vanguard" against the interpretation of Marx’s views on morality as moral relativism. He disagrees with the theoretical tendency of some scholars to separate Marxist factual statements regarding capitalism from its moral critiques. Instead, he endeavors to provide a theoretical defense of Marx’s moralism while maintaining Marx’s "orthodox concepts," and this theory is contextualism. Nielsen attempts a theoretical reconstruction of Marx’s moralism through a method of reduction, ultimately seeking "compatibility" between historical materialism and contextualism. Because Nielsen’s contextualism serves as a "positive" defense of Marx’s moralism, it has attracted increasing attention within current Chinese academic circles, where research on his theory is steadily intensifying. Looking at existing research outcomes, endorsement outweighs critique, and appropriation exceeds reflection; this is likely detrimental to a comprehensive and objective grasp of Nielsen’s theory. This article will take Nielsen's contextualism as its object of investigation, focusing on reflecting upon the "absence" of the dialectic within his contextualist defense, with the aim of prompting the academic community to re-examine and evaluate the scholarly value of Nielsen’s contextualist defense.

I. Nielsen’s Contextualism and His Defense of Marx’s Moralism

The primary targets of Nielsen’s polemic are those scholars who interpret Marxist ethics as moral relativism, arguing that the theory of morality within the materialist conception of history is a form of "meta-ethical relativism." Meta-ethical relativism holds that in historical materialism, moral ideas—as social ideology—are linked to specific modes of social production and are therefore subjective and relative; changes in specific modes of social production cause changes in people’s moral ideas. Thus, they assert that the view of morality in historical materialism is relativistic. However, in historical materialism, Marx and Engels also used morality as a standard to criticize the anti-human modes of production in capitalist society, thereby treating morality as an objective and absolute standard. Consequently, a contradiction between moral relativism and absolutism arises within historical materialism. This triggered the debate in contemporary Anglo-American Marxist ^[1] circles concerning issues of morality, equity, and justice. It was precisely within these debates that Nielsen launched a counterattack against "meta-ethical relativism" and proposed his own "contextualist" solution. Contextualism holds a pivotal, core position in Nielsen’s "defense theory"; it is not only a powerful weapon for refuting moral relativism but also the indispensable "magic weapon" for reconstructing Marx’s moralism.

In Nielsen’s view, the common theoretical flaw of moral relativists is that they oppose the mode of production to moral ideas within historical materialism, insisting on the separation of fact and value, and thus failing to escape the fixed mindset of "subject-object dualism." To this end, Nielsen believes his task is to bridge this "fissure" in historical materialism, advocating a return to contextualism to re-understand the work of Marx and Engels. Nielsen’s contextualist theory roughly comprises three aspects. First, it emphasizes that the situation [N] determines the objectivity of the content of people’s actual moral ideas, preventing moral ideas from lapsing into relativity or pluralism due to subjectivity. Nielsen argues that what determines the rightness or wrongness of people’s actions are their objective needs under specific conditions; the legitimacy of these needs determines the legitimacy of their actions, and the standards and grounds of morality are embedded within the context of these objective needs. "Right or wrong is primarily determined by the needs people have, by the objective situations in which they find themselves." Second, people’s moral ideas change according to changes in specific objective situations; the movement between situation and idea occurs within the situation as a whole, and no separation exists between the two. "For the contextualist, it is an already changed objective situation that justifies the change." The collective moral ideas of people in a specific society are determined by their common life-situation; it is impossible for divergent or opposing moral ideas to arise within the same life-situation. Thus, the claim that historical materialism separates morality from the mode of production is untenable. Third, he proposes contextualist moral principles. Although contextualism acknowledges that moral ideas change along with the specific situations in which they exist, people will reach a universal moral consensus through rational reflection within these changing situations, thereby forming moral ideas with stable content. Once formed, these ideas possess cross-cultural and cross-class validity, thus avoiding the theoretical danger of sliding into moral relativism by virtue of acknowledging "change." "The contextualist insists that there is a right way of looking at and acting in the world, though what that right way is involves a complex, context-dependent specific description." In this way, Nielsen proposes his own contextualist moral axioms; these are not eternal moral principles precisely demonstrated and established by philosophers, but rather rational "moral common sense" reached through people’s deliberate reflection. "It is in this sense that they are axioms, and it is in this sense that they are not trivial, although we always utter them so readily that we feel we are speaking commonplaces and insignificancies."

Nielsen believes that only by reducing historical materialism toward contextualism can one respond to the groundless accusations against Marx’s moralism and defend it without violating the basic positions of historical materialism. Therefore, it can be said that the "defense" Nielsen provides for Marx’s moralism is his contextualist reduction of historical materialism.

First, Nielsen reduces the "mode of production" in historical materialism to the "specific situation" of a given society in contextualism. In Nielsen's view, historical materialism should be interpreted as follows: in any concrete society, people establish the economy, politics, and culture of that society through productive activities, which together constitute the social situation as a whole. Within this social situation, people produce certain moral ideas adapted to it; thus, moral ideas naturally contain the objective content of that social situation. In this way, Nielsen transforms the "historical materialist proposition" that the mode of production determines moral ideology into a contextualist judgment that "a specific social situation determines people’s moral ideas," making a contextualist reduction possible. "Nielsen discovered a space within it to accommodate (rather than dissolve) the rationality and objectivity of morality. His core view is: in historical materialism, morality indeed possesses dependency, subjectivity, and flux; however, the material base and real life that determine the specific content and form of morality constitute an inescapable existential context. The objectivity and rationality of the context, as well as its priority and determining capacity over morality, promise that even as a subjective, determined element of the superstructure, morality possesses objectivity and rationality. Therefore, the Marxist conception of morality is neither pure objectivism nor pure subjectivism, but a form of contextualism."

Second, contextualism reduces "material needs" in historical materialism to "existential needs" within the social situation. Contextualism emphasizes that moral ideas arise because people have existential needs in specific situations; historical materialism similarly emphasizes that "needs" determine that people must engage in material productive activities. "Therefore, the first historical act is the production of the means to satisfy these needs, the production of material life itself, and indeed this is an historical act, a fundamental condition of all history, which today, as thousands of years ago, must daily and hourly be fulfilled merely in order to sustain human life." ^[2] Thus, Nielsen reduces the material needs of human existence in historical materialism to the objective needs for a social situation in contextualism, thereby reducing the "mode of production determining moral ideas" to "specific social situations generating moral beliefs." "Historical materialism view the prevailing morality in a society as a tool for the cultural 'legitimation' and stabilization of that society. They belong to the kind of tools 'functionally required by the given mode of production'." Thus, through contextualist reduction, Nielsen fuses the mode of production and moral ideas into a single whole within a specific social situation, achieving a "contextualist monism" of Marx’s moralism.

Finally, contextualism reduces "eternal moral principles" in historical materialism to "moral axioms" adapted to specific social situations. Moral relativists believe that historical materialism contains a contradiction between relative moral ideas and eternal moral principles. Nielsen also opposes the idea of perpetual upward progress brought about by the dialectic in historical materialism, advocating instead for a contextualist reduction of its social function. In historical materialism, morality has the social function of protecting the existing mode of production; this can be reduced to the contextualist idea that moral ideas have the function of maintaining the existing social situation. "For their respective societies, at their respective historical levels, they are functionally appropriate, historically necessary, and socio-economically inevitable." In this way, the moral principles of eternal justice in historical materialism regarding communism are reduced to "ethical concepts" within specific social situations—that is, "moral common sense" fused with the concrete social situation. "Historical materialism recognizes only contextualism; however, it can be well-suited to a concept of objectivist ethics." In this manner, Nielsen resolves the "theoretical challenge" posed by moral relativists who assert that historical materialism rejects eternal moral principles.

Through the contextualist reduction of historical materialism, Nielsen reduces specific social formations in historical materialism to a holistic system of social situations, achieving the "integration" of the mode of production and moral ideas within a contextualist horizon. It is undeniable that this has, to some extent, resolved the "hermeneutical crisis" brought to historical materialism by Western Marxist moral relativists. It is easy to see that the focal point of the debate between Nielsen’s contextualism and moral relativists is centered on the understanding of historical materialism itself: namely, is the relationship between the mode of production and moral ideas in historical materialism a "dualistic split" or a "monistic unity"? Nielsen’s work is to use contextualist "monism" to bridge the "dualism" of moral relativism. Thus, before evaluating the value of Nielsen’s theory of contextualist reduction, we need to ask: in the historical materialism founded by Marx and Engels, is there a "subject-object dualism" where the mode of production and moral ideas are separated, or are they a unified whole that has never been separated? If the answer is the latter, then the accusations of moral relativism are groundless and meaningless. The same answer would apply to Nielsen’s contextualism: if the mode of production and moral ideas are a unified whole in historical materialism, then the value—and even the legitimacy—of Nielsen’s contextualist "monism" needs to be re-evaluated. Naturally, the clarification of these issues requires us to face the theoretical nature of historical materialism "itself," particularly through a "prior" discussion and elucidation of whether there exists a holistic structure of unity between the mode of production and moral ideas.

II. The Dialectically Unified Holistic Structure in the Materialist Conception of History and Its Theoretical Origins

In Nielsen's view, it is precisely because Marxist moral relativists "accepted the Kantian dualism of fact and value" and resolutely defended the philosophical tenet that "values cannot be derived from facts" that they ultimately concluded that Marx's historical materialism is incompatible with morality. However, the philosophical lineage developing from Kant through Hegel to Marx does not support this reasoning. While Kant did indeed draw an impassable "epistemological" boundary between the phenomenal and the noumenal, and a theory of separation between "factual judgments" and "value judgments" certainly exists in his transcendental philosophy, once Hegel utilized dialectics to break through Kant’s "dualistic" boundary, the dialectical unity between fact and value reached its completion within his speculative philosophical system. Following Marx’s inheritance and application of the "rational kernel" of Hegelian dialectics, the dialectical structure of the unity of fact and value remained integrally preserved within the theoretical construction of historical materialism.

Specifically, Kant strictly partitioned human cognition and morality into the two realms of necessity and freedom. In the phenomenal world, humans follow fixed laws of the understanding, imposing the transcendental forms of the categories of understanding onto empirical appearances, thereby forming factual judgments where "man legislates for nature." However, the understanding cannot trespass into the absolute and infinite realm of the noumena; to do so would create the "logical illusions" of reason. The foundation of human morality cannot be established upon actions in the empirical world, but must instead be rooted in the subjective will that governs action—a subjective will residing in the non-empirical noumenal realm. Free will is free precisely because it is not controlled by natural laws and can legislate for itself according to reason; thus, all human moral laws are moral imperatives that humans establish for themselves. In this way, within Kant’s transcendental philosophical system, factual judgments belong to the realm of necessity of the understanding, while value judgments belong to the realm of freedom of reason. Due to the strict boundary between understanding and reason, and between necessity and freedom, we naturally cannot derive rational value judgments from the factual judgments of the understanding. "Kant had accepted the separation of fact and value and sought to construct a moral system that could be justified from within itself, independent of the (material) world."

In Hegel's view, the reason Kant insisted on the separation of phenomenon and noumenon, of fact and value, was determined by his mode of "understanding-based thinking" (知性思维方式 ^[4]). This mode insists on a strict opposition between thinking and being, between the subjective and the objective. "That mere abstract understanding-based thinking is confined to the form of the abstract universal and cannot progress to the specification of this universal." Hegel used dialectics to open up the boundary between Kant’s phenomenal and noumenal realms, elevating human cognition for the first time from understanding-based thinking to dialectical thinking, and advancing philosophy itself from "dualism" to a "monism" of speculative philosophy. Hegel used the Absolute Idea to achieve the unity of nature and human society, constructing a dialectically unified structure of the "trinity" of Idea, Nature, and Spirit. Here, the Idea is the pure content itself, while Nature in reality and Spirit in human society are the mediations and vehicles through which the Idea realizes itself. Nature allows the Idea to manifest through the motion of matter, while human society realizes the Idea through the motion of spirit. The Absolute Idea exists as "content" in a potential state, while Nature and Spirit are the actualization of this "content." Thus, the process by which the Idea realizes itself in nature and human spirit is the process of the Idea developing from potentiality to actuality, constituting the dialectical movement of the Idea’s transition into and development through nature and spirit. "And the Idea is at the same time that which realizes itself by setting itself against itself, and in this opposition is merely the activity within itself."

Consequently, Hegel completed the dialectical unity of the subjective and the objective based on the Idea. This "unity" encompasses both the unity of nature and human society and the unity of human subjective spirit and objective spirit. It manifests specifically as follows: nature and the human spirit are different ways in which the same content of the Idea actualizes itself, and man’s subjective consciousness and external behavior are likewise the internalization and externalization of the same Idea. As Arnold Ruge noted in his evaluation of Hegel: "All theory itself is practice (Praxis); the difference between theory and practice lies only in whether the spirit turns inward or outward." Thus, a person's subjective moral concepts and objective moral actions are the potential and actual forms of the same Idea; we can entirely derive the value judgment "he is a good person" based on the "factual judgment" of his moral behavior. Therefore, Hegel achieved the dialectical unity of fact and value based on the Idea and established the principle that development from "potentiality" to "actuality" is a dialectical unity. So, when Hegel elevated the mode of thinking from the understanding to the dialectical thinking of reason, the subjective and objective, and fact and value—which were originally separated in the understanding—attained an integral dialectical unity.

Marx used practice to transform Hegel's "Absolute Idea," taking the practical activity of man as the subject and the objectified social productive forces as the foundation for all real existence in human society. "The whole character of a species, its species-character, resides in the nature of its life activity, and free conscious activity is the species-character of man." In Marx’s view, all real existence in human society is the result of human material production, including both material means of subsistence and spiritual social ideologies; both are unified in practice. Thus, Marx provides us with a social structure of dialectical totality: practice is the ground and content of human society; labor products and social ideologies are the appearances of society. Between practice and products, and between practice and social ideology, there exists a dialectical relationship of potentiality and actualization. This dialectical unity manifests in two aspects.

First, in human productive activity, man’s "species-nature" is a "potential" nature residing within the subject that has not yet been realized; it must actualize itself into products through the practical activity of production. "Man does not take possession of the object directly, but in a practical way, objectifying his own essential powers, turning nature into 'man’s inorganic body,' and thereby forming a new type of negative unitary relationship with nature mediated by practical activity." Thus, the labor product becomes the product of the objectification of man's essential nature, achieving a dialectical unity between man’s species-essence and the product of labor. Second, in specific social formations, the practical activity of humans transforming the world is concretized into a specific mode of production, which is the realistic ground for the existence of the social formation, while social ideology is the "conscious appearance" presented in human social concepts. Thus, the objective mode of production and the subjective social formation constitute a dialectical unity of "content and appearance." That is to say, in a specific social formation, the mode of production determines the ideology of the people in that society through the development from "potentiality to actuality"; the ideological concepts of the people necessarily contain the "objective content" of that social mode of production. Similarly, the ideology of people in a society reflects the mode of production of that society in a way that "appearance relies on content." Therefore, regarding the ideology of a specific society, it is both a factual reflection of whether the social mode of production at a particular historical stage is "true," and a value verification for us to judge whether the mode of production at that specific historical stage conforms to the development of human nature. Thus, the "factual judgments" and "value judgments" directed at a specific social formation are unified within the foundation of human practice.

This being the case, there is no separation between the mode of production and social ideology in historical materialism, and even less a split between fact and value. The mode of production is the objective social ground, while ideology is the subjective "appearance" of social consciousness; the two stand in an essential relationship, a dialectical unity of potential content and actual appearance. Therefore, in the historical materialism of Marx and Engels, the relationship between the mode of production and moral concepts is not a "dualism" of subject-object separation, but a "monism" built upon the totality of dialectics. In fact, both Hegel and Marx, from the theoretical height of dialectical thinking, transcended Kantian dualism and achieved the dialectical unity of factual and value judgments. The ground of Hegel’s dialectical unity is the Absolute Idea, while the ground of Marx’s dialectical unity is practice. Thus, the "dualism" alleged by Western Marxist moral relativists collapses of its own accord. Their attempt to use Kantian dualism to reconstruct and criticize Marx’s moralism loses its rationality, because they fail to see the dismantling of the "understanding" mode of thinking by Hegelian and Marxist dialectics, and they ignore how the totality of dialectical unity has already completed the immanent transcendence of the "dualism" of the understanding. Regarding Nielsen’s contextualism, since a dialectically unified "monism" originally exists within historical materialism, it is quite necessary to examine whether the "monism" presented in his contextualism conforms to "dialectical monism."

III. The "Absence" of Dialectics in the Contextualist Reduction of Historical Materialism

Although Nielsen opposes moral relativism, his attitude toward opposing dialectics is no different from that of the moral relativists. They all acknowledge that "Marx's concept of dialectics clearly comes from Hegel." However, generally speaking, they hold clear prejudices against the dialectics in Hegel's and Marx's philosophies. This is manifested in their refusal to recognize dialectics as a rational law for humans to transcend "understanding-based cognition," their lack of endorsement for the critique of the "understanding" mode of thinking by the dialectical mode of thinking, and their resolute denial that dialectics can achieve the unity of subject and object, or that dialectical logic is an intentional logic concerning the thing-in-itself. In their view, there is nothing special about dialectics; it is merely a subjective conceptual framework used by people to observe the world. "Whether in Hegelian or Marxist form, dialectics should be understood as a universal concept regarding a certain type of intellectual structure that can be discovered in the world, while the dialectical conceptual system or dialectical method should be seen as a set of procedures regarding a theoretical structure that can best reflect the aforementioned intellectual structure." They also jointly believe that dialectics is not superior to other philosophical methods, and that its view of hierarchical progress might even bring people blind optimism, passionate fanaticism, or even utopian imaginings. Thus, Nielsen's contextualist reduction of historical materialism becomes justified and necessary, and the dialectic within historical materialism becomes the "conceptual system" most in need of reduction. Here, we can see that it is precisely the "incompatibility" between Nielsen's contextualism and dialectics that eventually leads to the somber "departure" of dialectics from historical materialism as reconstructed through contextualist reduction.

First, contextualism annuls the dialectical social structure of "ground and content" characteristic of historical materialism. Nielsen uses contextualism to reduce the various social formations in human history delineated by historical materialism into social contexts within specific time and space. Within these, production, needs, culture, and moral concepts are all constituent elements of the social context; they coexist and co-evolve as a natural social system. In this system, it is considered entirely legitimate and reasonable that production determines people's ideas and that ideas reflect production. Nielsen believes that only such a contextual reduction can effectively overcome the split between production and ideas found in historical materialism. However, in Nielsen’s contextual system, there is no longer a decisive social "ground" ^[5], much less any "social appearance" determined by that ground. All constituent elements of society are artificially pulled back to the "surface" of the empirical world and reduced to "social appearances." Consequently, contextualism constructs an ecosystem composed merely of numerous empirical appearances, while "practice"—which originally played the decisive role within social formations in the materialist conception of history—is illegitimately suspended. The relationship of the "essential objectification" ^[6] of other social existents produced through "practice" is also reduced to a symbiotic relationship of mutual interaction between various elements within the contextual system. Clearly, contextualism illegitimately severs the dialectical movement from "latency" to "actuality" between the ground of content and empirical appearance. It "evicts" the dialectical thinking and method originally contained in historical materialism through its contextualist reduction. Contextualism, having lost dialectics as its foundation, becomes a confederation of "phenomena" involving interactions between appearances; although appearances are concrete and vivid within a context, they become a "manifold" ^[7] of appearances that are rootless, floating, detached, and disordered. As Lenin pointed out when elucidating the relationship between form and content in dialectics: "Form is substantial. It is a form of living, real content, inseparably connected with content."

Second, contextualism recognizes only those moral beliefs that correspond to specific social contexts and denies the "eternal moral principles" of historical materialism that correspond to the progress of the mode of production. Nielsen believes that historical materialism contains a contradiction between relative moral concepts and absolute moral principles. His method of resolving this contradiction is to annul the concept of progress in the sequential evolution of the various stages of human society, reducing the social formations of each link to concrete contexts of real existence. Thus, he asserts that only the moral concepts originating from the actual needs of a concrete context are truly valid moral principles. The contextualist moral principle given by Nielsen is: "To strive to achieve equal consideration for the needs of everyone, while at the same time, in coordination with such equal consideration for needs, to satisfy the needs of all people to the greatest extent at the highest level achievable." However, the contextualist reduction Nielsen performs here similarly violates the dialectical principles of historical materialism. Historical materialism divides human history into links and stages connected by various concrete social formations, but these links are unified within the practical ground of the mode of production; they are "links" internal to the "totality." This fully conforms to the principle of the dialectical unity between the "necessity of the link" and the "wholeness of truth" in dialectics. Therefore, within concrete social formations, historical materialism opposes all moral ideologies that serve specific historical stages and specific classes. Simultaneously, Marx believed that at the highest stage of the development of human history, humanity's eternal moral principles would finally develop; this is also entirely based on the necessity of the objective development of human history. Thus, when we stand on the position of Marx's "dialectical" view of history, we find that there is fundamentally no contradiction between relative moral concepts and eternal moral principles in historical materialism. This is entirely caused by contextualism’s "understanding-based" ^[8] reduction of historical materialism; it is an "intellectual contradiction" ^[9] of its own making being imposed upon historical materialism.

In short, Nielsen's contextualism is the theoretical product of "the thinking of the understanding" ^[10]. The result of his reduction of historical materialism is the degradation of historical materialism—which is established at the theoretical height of dialectical thinking—into an "understanding-based" comprehension. In fact, whether in the context of German Classical Philosophy or the context of Marxist philosophy, the thinking of the understanding is distinct from rational dialectical thinking, and the method of the understanding cannot replace the rational dialectical method. Nielsen failed to realize that an "incommensurable" heterogeneity exists between his contextualism and historical materialism as established at the theoretical height of dialectical thinking. Therefore, Nielsen’s contextualist reduction can never escape the theoretical predicament of "using the understanding to interpret reason" and is fundamentally unable to interpret the dialectical connotations contained within historical materialism.

(Authors: Shu Guifeng, Zheng Dongdong; School of Philosophy, Liaoning University) (This article is a phased result of the National Social Science Fund of China Key Project "A Study of the Moral Critique of Capitalism by Contemporary Anglo-American Marxists" [19AKS003]) Online Editor: Tong Xin Source: Foreign Theoretical Trends (国外理论动态), Issue 6, 2021